BAN THE RIGHT TO BE RICH!

Financial crisis, economic migration, delocalisation, homelessness, unemployment, social unrest, environmental destruction, decay of education and health, criminality, poverty are all caused by the fact that we are allowed to be rich. That is, to have much more than we ever need, and therefore to make the life of others difficult or impossible.

Being rich is a right universally recognized and nobody ever dared to question this right. It is high time we did this now.

We need to finally ban the right to be rich!

Not by the abolition of private property and by giving more power to the state, as communists proposed, but by limiting personal wealth. Economic initiative should be private, market should be let free to regulate itself, but individuals should posses much less than they are currently allowed to.

1. Personal wealth is of no economic use for the community and for the others. Economy works because share holders decide to invest together with other shareholders in a business or another, not because their shares are big.

2. Moreover, big fortunes tend to build big companies, but logic and experience show that small and medium-size businesses are those able to sustain a healthy economy.

3. Logic also tells us that we cannot be all rich, and that the more the rich get richer, the poorer the others get.

4. Capitalist system tricks us by persuading us that anyone can get rich. What it doesn't say is that at any moment in history there can be only a very small minority of rich people, i.e. that at any moment in time 99% of us cannot be rich. Then what's the use to allow people to be rich, if only 1% could become so, in exchange of others suffering from it?

5. Imagine a society without rich: nobody has more than a house, a car, a boat and so on; nobody earns more than s/he needs in order to have a happy life: go to theater, travel, study, stay healthy, have children, eat in a restaurant, buy a high-end device, build/buy a house etc. (How much exactly does that mean? It depends on the local political, social, economical and cultural conditions of every community/country.)

That means, no more people who own tens of cars, hundreds of houses (many of them uninhabited), entire football clubs, half of the coffee-shops in the city, private islands, thousands of hectares of land, universities and hospitals, or chains of restaurants and supermarkets throughout the world. Also no more people who have millions or billions in shares invested in all these things.

6. Society would finally manage to regulate itself: successful businesses would have to share their gains, either by attracting new shareholders (from among the employees, for example), or by donating the surplus, building schools, theaters and hospitals and helping the community grow.

7. Imagine a society where everyone would posses a house and thus not fear homelessness; where employers wouldn't try to raise their profits by reducing employers' already low wages; or by opting for subcontractors, junk jobs or to delocalise jobs, so that employees benefit of low salaries and no insurances, and that corporate has no more responsibility for the employers; where politicians and businessmen don't need to look for profit at any environmental cost; where universities stop turning into fabrics, and hospitals into supermarkets for the pharmaceutical companies; and so on.

8. Imagine a world without wars, genocides and famines caused by multinationals who try to despoil entire countries.

9. What would be the driving force of economy if one cannot be rich anymore? Back to point 4: only 1% of us can be rich anyway, so isn't it stupid to think that becoming rich is what motivates us to wake up in the morning and go to work?

10. What would all the consequences of such a change for the world as we know it? We cannot really predict them, nobody can, we can only imagine the repercussions. But one thing is sure: We are fed up with our communities being torn apart and our fellow people being transformed into “human resources” for an infernal machine meant only to make more and more profit for only a few of us.

So dear representatives of the European people, we urge you to ban the right to be rich!

THANK YOU!

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